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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I think (and have been saying this a bunch lately) that he's right about ActivityPub and Mastodon, and that "a universal timeline" is actually a really good way to put words to it. I was a Mastodon hater for years, but having used it for the past month or so with an actual community of people (really: the whole community I interacted with on Twitter before), I have to admit it: the ActivityPub people were right about this. It's easy to see the potential, and how it pulls in the writing we were all doing before there was Twitter while keeping most of what Twitter was good for too.

I'm expecting this to be the second-dumbest thing I ever predicted badly (I dismissed MP3s, too!)

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I was sceptical too, but at this point I would say 75% of the people I followed who I really got value from have moved over. But not only that, the conversation has become better, more in depth and less fleeting.

I just hope the last few people I follow on Twitter who I really enjoy following move over too. But unfortunately that's "Space Twitter", so we will see...

> I'm expecting this to be the second-dumbest thing I ever predicted badly (I dismissed MP3s, too!)

Fret not; when Sony released the first digital Mavica (the one that stored pictures on 1.44" floppys) I would have made a bet that digital photography will never take off.

My only lame excuse it that at this time it was just unfeasible imagining that one day in the not too distant future you'd be able to store terabytes of memory on a device the size of a thumbnail.

Still, not one of my best predictions.

I was _very_ sceptical of Netflix (the streaming incarnation, not ye olde postal DVD thingy); I didn't think the economics could be made to work, or that everyone would buy an AppleTV or similar to use it (I very much wasn't counting on smarttvs...)

Realistically much of the success of Netflix is thanks to a partnership with Microsoft and the Xbox 360.

They didn't have to worry about a set-top box + I believe MS helped them serve content from XBL servers.

When I first heard of YouTube (video through Net???), I thought it would never take off... :)

Me too. And now I find it so invaluable.

Works like charm.

OK, I have to ask- What exactly was your argument against MP3's? They literally let you transfer music with an order of magnitude less data than it took on the CD! Was it an audiophile argument, or...?

I was lucky enough to live in a freshman college dorm (a music-focused dorm, no less!) circa 1997-1998 when Napster was still a thing right after MP3's were a thing, and that shit was amaaaaazing

I mean given how much people love music, I never had any doubt that MP3's would be revolutionary

In the set-associative cache that was my brain in 1998, MP3s occupied the same slot as XDCC'd Amiga mods. But much bigger files. I was carrying around giant folders of CDs at the time. Also: you had to listen to them... on your computer? I had a whole discrete stereo system. Why would I want to listen to music through game speakers?

Didn't your discrete stereo system have external inputs? I've had an analog cable from my computer's line-out to the stereo system's aux-in from pretty much the same day that my parents let me have my own pc in my bedroom (which was 1996, I think).

These days it's a USB cable rather than a cinch cable, and vorbis/flac rather than mp3, but my PC has been my main music player for more than 25 years -- and the only pair of "game" speakers I've owned were positioned in the living room. Come to think of it, those speakers may very well have been the reason I was allowed a computer in my bedroom :)

Anyway... thank you for prompting that trip down memory lane, I enjoyed it.

I mean, to be clear, I did eventually come around on MP3s! I don't still lug a 15 pound folder of CDs around with me everywhere. It just took me longer than everyone else. :)

To put a timeline on this: I also ended up buying one of those Empeg in-dash MP3 players.

3.5mm to RCA adapters were a thing! Usually very, very long ones.

My PC is still connected 3.5mm to RCA to a old stereo box to my Dad's old full size JL430w Kenwoods which use the same 40 year old speaker wires. Still great sound!

Napster didn't start until 1999 :) I remember downloading mp3s on Napster, and then using my parallel port to transfer them to my Diamond Rio MP3 player. All 4 songs at a time!

Before Napster there was FTP.

The first MP3 I downloaded was from IRC and played back on the Fraunhofer Institute MP3 player. Old timers will remember that if you caused your screen to redraw at all, say by scrolling a window, the audio would skip. The first song? Bob Dylan - Stuck in the Middle With You… which is actually by Steeler’s Wheel.

Oh man, I remember when the Xing MP3 encoder was the only one that could encode in near-realtime on my 100 MHz Pentium back in the day.

And it applied an exciting washy flanger effect to the cymbals as well

An F-serves on IRC. Much respect to the glorious bastards running FTPs and F-serves off their dorm ResNet connections. The rest of us poor slobs on dial-up could actually max out our downstream bandwidth.

There were also quite a few websites that just straight up hosted MP2s/MP3s for public download. I can't recall domain names but I do remember .se and .ru being common tlds.

I couldn't read a single word of Swedish or Russian, but my friends and I figured out how to navigate to the music downloads.

It was probably just FTP through the school's network then, but I distinctly remember sharing MP3's like it was the Wild West

Yeah, when I snagged my first ""backup"" mp3 of an amazing piece of music I had never before heard (I think it was "Megalomaniac" by KMFDM) in a measly 3 megs or so, I knew this format was about to take the world by storm. It was blatantly obvious.

I remember my processor struggled so much even playing it, I basically had to just listen to the mp3 on its own. I eventually figured out I could play 96kbps mp3s without slowing things down too much. These were such amazing times for me, suddenly exposed to an entire planet of music there's zero possible chance I would have otherwise heard.

KMFDM is admittedly pretty awesome to discover

If you want to help make the Fediverse happen, there appears to be a serious need for energy and ideas in the standards effort.

I have a thread going here https://hachyderm.io/@PeterBronez/109688815511361197

But the upshot is, get involved with:

https://www.w3.org/community/socialcg/

The Fediverse has already happened. It's about to celebrate its 15th year in a handful of months.

https://fediverse.party/en/post/fediverse-14-years-in-2022/

Hmm counting from Identi.ca? Fair enough.

What’s the term you prefer for this stage of its growth then?

The jump to 7 figures of MAU in the wake of Twitter’s collapse seems like an important change to me. The idea might be 15 years old, but the dominant implementation (Mastodon) started ~2016, the modern protocol (ActivityPub) arrived in 2018, and the last four years seem to have been mostly a small community working out the kinks.

Now it’s going mainstream. It’s held up remarkably well so far, but there are significant technical, economic and governance challenges to overcome if Fedi is going to fulfill it’s potential as the dominant interoperability layer for online collaboration.

I suppose my larger point is we're not in any particular hurry to grow: it'll get there when it gets there.

Who is we ?

me and my four fediverse buddies.

FriendFeed lives again!!

Are there any guides, tools, apps, etc to try out ActivityPub?

Martin fowler made a guide from his own transition to mastodon https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-mastodon.html

I reference a few in my orientation thread https://hachyderm.io/@PeterBronez/109521578914692484

For learning ActivityPub specifically, the best meta-guide I’ve found is https://tinysubversions.com/notes/reading-activitypub/

Have they fixed conversation threading, or does it not matter vs twitter since twitter's threading is horribly broken as well?

Depends on what you mean by "they" and "fixed". There's a few clients. They do threading in different ways. I'm sure you'll find one that does what you like.

I mean actually threading the conversation. I.e. how hacker news does it.

I can't remember which ones, but I've seen at least 2 clients doing just that. There's also Toot! with its "subway map on the border" approach which solves the longer nesting in a different way.

RSS? We had it until everyone ceded control to Google because it was convenient. <Shrug>

May I ask what was your original argument against Mastodon?

I looked at in terms of the "Fediverse", a coherent decentralized social network, with lots of instances cooperating to make one intentional thing. I'm still not bullish about that. But once you use it, you see that it's basically hyper-interactive RSS.

(Maybe you see the two at the same thing; I don't.)

To be fair, there still isn't an easy way (that I know of) to make sites (dynamic first, static later) ActivityPub participants.

I'd love it if my site's posts were ActivityPub posts, with ActivityPub replies being shown on the site as comments. I think that would be an amazing thing, but it's currently not very easy to do.

I guess I better get coding again.

This is similar to how micro.blog has implemented ActivityPub support, from what I can gather. Here's their documentation from when the feature was released: https://help.micro.blog/t/mastodon-and-activitypub/95

Oh excellent, thanks! I wonder how hard it is to make an RSS-to-ActivityPub service.

Darius Kazemi, the creator of Hometown, made an AP server where you can register a feed and it turns into an actor (ie an account): https://github.com/dariusk/rss-to-activitypub

I made my own thing, fetching an RSS feed and posting entries to an existing account. It makes the code much simpler, but is not practical if you have lots of feeds (you need yo create all accounts separately): https://sr.ht/~rakoo/rss2ap/

That's fantastic, thanks! Just what I was looking for.

I believe there’s a WordPress ActivityPub plug-in now which helps with this for a large portion of sites out there

> I looked at in terms of the "Fediverse", a coherent decentralized social network, with lots of instances cooperating to make one intentional thing.

So what was your original argument against this?

That it will never cohere. (That's about as much as I want to say about this right now; this gets boring pretty quickly.)

Yeah. The vision of a unified fediverse at Twitter scale seems unhelpful. The whole point is that you don’t have to align with everyone else, you can do your own thing and opt into the world the way you want.

This contradiction flares up in many places. Most obviously, the existing community HATES all kinds of analytics, search, etc because they’re concerned they can be weaponized by trolls. At the same time, Mastodon has all kinds of unauthenticated APIs that make it trivial to slurp data. Mastodon doesn’t even let you post stuff to just your local instance!

I expect that the current post-twitter-collapse energy will result in ActivityPub 2.0, and that revision of the spec will make it easier to control where your posts go.

Ultimately I think the Fediverse will agree on the core protocol, splinter over activity vocabularies, and scatter over moderation standards. That Will Be Fine and we’ll have something clearly better the Web 2.0 local maxima we’ve been trapped in for the last decade or so.

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